A warning about Catalina and the 2019 Mac Pro

[Drew Lahat]

I’m sorry to hear that “early adopter” pains beleaguer this system. The whole point of putting up with the MP’s cost is so you can hit the ground running and not spend days dealing with wrangling software configurations. With that amount of hassle you could’ve migrated everything to Windows by now… (and I’m saying that as someone who’s been all-Mac for 10 years, and still is.)

For the rest of us, the natural conclusion is simply that it’s too early to update to Catalina – and since the MP only supports Catalina & up, it’s too early to buy the MP.

As for myself, I used to be the facility engineer of a post-house, ACMT, and maintained Macs all around Hollywood… and now, running my own little outfit, I’m very happy with my 2010 cMP workhorse. ☺ Kitted with plenty of RAM, USB3, and a modern AMD GPU, it happily runs Resolve, CC2020 and crunches 4K.
The pace of technology updates is so frantic these days, I think one of the worst things you can do is follow all of Apple’s updates. It’s about maintaining the system the works for your work, not the other way around.

[Joe Marler]

[Herb Sevush] “It turns out that you can’t start up the 2019 Catalina MP with any external disk that is also not Catalina (and that’s not easy to do either.) There is no way to wipe the drive of the 2019 Mac Pro and install an earlier OSX. None. It has something to do with Catalina and something to do with the security chip in the 2019’s boot drive. “

Some of the problems you encountered might happen with any T2-based machine with Secure Boot enabled. If so you might have encountered this on an iMac Pro or a MacBook Pro 16. If you have certain backup/restore/migration workflows from the pre-T2 era, this can be a painful experience — but it’s not necessarily the Mac Pro.

There have been issues with T2 security since day one. When the iMac Pro was released, Apple support would often recommend you erase the entire machine then re-install macOS to resolve a problem. Yet on a T2 machine with default security, that could result in a non-bootable machine. After erasing the machine it then disallowed network-based macOS install from Apple’s own servers. You also couldn’t boot from a clone — whether CCC, Super Duper, or anything else. The only solution was return the machine to Apple. I happened to have a Time Machine backup (which the T2 security system trusted), otherwise my iMac Pro would have been returned to Apple to “un-brick” it. This is not supposition but the result of many hours on the phone with Apple escalation support.

This may have been mitigated in more recent MacOS versions but the lesson I learned was immediately disable Secure Boot on all T2 machines.

There are still issues with this, and to install SoftRAID you must disable Secure Boot:

https://downloads.owc.com/softraid/mac/SoftRAID%20Installation%20with%20Catalina.pdf

In a recent Mac Geek Gab Podcast, Mike Bombich (developer of Carbon Copy Cloner) discussed various issues caused by APFS and Catalina. This included how APFS, encryption, and Catalina affect space consumption, migration, and backup/restore.

https://www.macobserver.com/podcasts/macgeekgab-796/

[Gianluca Mazzarolo]

Not sure if it might work in the latest VMs, but you could install a VM, install MacOS Mojave into it, and then just install FCPX + your older plugins there. Worth trying if you really need Mojave.

Or of course try to find alternatives to those plugins.

[Gianluca Mazzarolo]

Imho, that’s just another good reason not to use SoftRAID…

[Steve Zavo]

FWIW, my modest experience with 2020 MacPro:
Did ALL fresh installs.
No OSX backwards compatibility allowed.
Super Duper to clone a back up OSX drive but here is a little screwballling
around necessary (just follow the on screen prompts or ask apple care) for your FIRST clone.
I too have NO functioning dynamic link connection MacPro to Audition.
I have no plug ins so my machine hums.
I run my old machine (OSX High Sierra) on the MacPro 2020 with
screen sharing to copy files or operate obsolete software.
That’s all for now, best of luck !!

[Erik Lindahl]

First reading this I figured the MacPro 2019 was “broken” in some way but really it’s, sadly, a case of how Apples – or rather any hardware and software works in this day and age.

You can’t ever down-grade a minimum system required for a given hardware. One could chime this as poor design but that’s always been the case. I’d never expect to be able to fall back to an older system or software version with a new machine. It sucks for sure but it’s a fact of our current world.

The fact that a lot of apps would break with macOS 10.15 I also figured was a given. If it ain’t 64-bit and really officially supported by system X, one shouldn’t expect it to work. Again, I just take this for granted – test before you update or upgrade.

It’s ironic that a lot of people moving to the Mac Pro 2019 says “it’s worth the cost since the system is up and running in a matter of hours” where clearly this isn’t the case for everyone (including the person who started this thread). That’s harsh for the people caught in situations where app X or Y won’t work anymore or where hardware Z just isn’t updated for the new guy in town. Sadly this has more or less always been the case.

For me the transition to the Mac Pro 2019 will be a clean install and a re-evaluation or all the software including plugins I use. The nMP 2013 will be frozen in time on the system it’s currently on as I know what works and doesn’t on it. Moving to the new hopefully only takes a day or two but I will most defiantly keep “the old” until I feel 100% confident in the new hardware and software.

One huge “gotcha” also seems to be the T2 chip and that you should disable most of its security features for doing things “like you have” (booting from external HDDs for example).

[Oliver Peters]

[Erik Lindahl] “It’s ironic that a lot of people moving to the Mac Pro 2019 says “it’s worth the cost since the system is up and running in a matter of hours” “

That’s been my experience now with several iMac Pros (not Catalina) at work and just yesterday again with a new, loaner 16″ MBP (with Catalina) that I have in for a review. But these have never been migrations. Only clean installs. Log in with my various account IDs and install the Apple App Store software, Adobe CC apps, FxFactory plug-ins, etc. Then a few extras, like Resolve, Chrome, and some plug-ins that require individual installations and authorization. Up and running in half a day.

But yes, Catalina is a major change that does require evaluation. For example, Media Composer editors shouldn’t go Catalina yet. All pertinent software must be updated if possible. Some simply won’t be compatible and you won’t be able to use them. Plus Catalina is different in lots of little way. I find its “do you want to allow..” prompts to be the most annoying of any OS to date (including Windows). But once these are set, they seem to stick.

Like many of these changes, we’ll grumble and complain, eventually adopt, and then move on.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com

[Jim Curtis]

I just browsed this thread, and maybe this has been addressed, but you can indeed boot off an external drive on this new Mac. I’ve done it. It requires some finagling with the Security settings. I forget how, but it’s possible.

I also wanted to see if I could install Mojave, so I made an external cloned boot disk, wiped the internal drive, and gave it a go. No luck, so I restored Catalina from my external drive. I use SuperDuper to clone my boot drive weekly, and have booted off it a few times to run Disk First Aid on the internal drive.

I have also booted off my Disk Warrior USB flash drive to run Disk First Aid.

All that said, Catalina still needs work. I’ve reinstalled it four times to fix OS level craziness and heart stopping disappearances of vital functionality, like app switching, the Finder going MIA entirely, and my User settings becoming hopelessly corrupted – a case where my clone saved my ass by Migrating the User folder back onto my internal drive.

Jim Curtis
jamesphilipcurtis.com

MacPro7,1 24-core – 256 GB RAM – AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB – 10.15.3

[Morten Carlsen]

Hi Herb,

I too know of your gripes. I got an 16 Inch MBP and thought I could just override installation and install Mojave. Not possible…

To anyone reading this…. ALL Hardware from Apple shipping with Catalina Pre-installed will NOT be able to boot or run on macOS Systems prior to Catalina !!!!

Anyway, I managed to get ALL my plug-ins (aside those which are only 32 bits) working on Catalina. So Herb my questions is – What exactly prevented you from using Catalina ?

Thanks Morten

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[Eric Santiago]

[Jim Curtis] ” I use SuperDuper to clone my boot drive weekly, and have booted off it a few times to run Disk First Aid on the internal drive.
“

Hi Jim, the SuperDuper does a clean clone at all times? Do you overwrite the existing clone or go into iterations?
We are waiting on a few 2019s and I’ve been testing DeepFreeze on a 2013 Mac Pro with a fresh Catalina install.
I’ve been using the THAWSPACE function for the user folder and so far so good.
I am hoping this will be the same with new MPs.